Buddhist Monks and Nuns: A Community of White Crows

By Ven. Thubten Kunsel

Actually, being a monk or nun is like being a white crow. Crows are black, right? If there’s a white one, it doesn’t fit in. — Geshe Lhundrup Sopa

It was Shakyamuni Buddha himself, the first Buddhist monk, who set the precedent for the way of life of his monks and nuns, a tradition that has remained intact for two and a half thousand years in much of Asia and is now tentatively taking root in the Western world.

Although the majority of the millions of Buddhists are lay people, it is taught that the ordained Sangha are crucial: the existence of the Buddhadharma in any one place depends upon the presence there of at least four ordained Sangha practicing the full extent of the vinaya, Buddha’s guidelines on moral conduct. Lord Buddha himself said, “Wherever there is a bikkshu observing the vinaya, that place is luminous, is radiant. I see that place as not empty: I myself abide there peacefully.”

Although anyone, lay or ordained, has the capacity to develop spiritually by practicing Buddha’s methods, it is mainly among the Sangha that the great teachers and saints have existed. Thus it is in Buddhist cultures that the monastic tradition has flourished, and is supported and honored as the supreme expression of spiritual fulfillment and benefit to others.

Many thousands of monks and nuns study and practice Lord Buddha’s teachings in monasteries throughout Asia; and in Tibet alone, before the Communist incursion, one sixth of the population, at least a million people, were monks and nuns.

For a thousand years the Buddhism of Tibet was virtually unknown beyond its Himalayan borders. Only since the enforced exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one of the greatest living Buddhist monks, in the watershed year of 1959, have the rich and vast teachings and practices of Tibet’s thousands of monasteries become accessible to the rest of the world.

Now, His Holiness and the scores of Tibet’s remaining greatest masters, most of them monks, as well as the thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns, attempt to keep alive the whole spectrum of Buddha’s sutra and tantra teachings in their newly established monasteries in India and Nepal. And it is here that thousands of Westerners began meeting and studying with these lamas, making the Buddhist way of life their own.

Two such masters are Lama Thubten Yeshe (1935-1984) and Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. Together as teacher and disciple since their exile in India, they met their first Western student in 1967 – who became their first Western nun soon after.

By 1971 these lamas had established Kopan Monastery near Kathmandu in Nepal, where they started in earnest to teach Westerners, who flocked in the hundreds to Kopan’s meditation courses.

Soon Kopan was home to a burgeoning group of Western Sangha, which in 1975 Lama Yeshe named the International Mahayana Institute. Kopan is also the wellspring of the worldwide network of some 90 Buddhist centers and activities, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, of which the IMI, with its 160 monks and nuns, is a small but utterly vital part.

Over the centuries Buddhism has moved beyond its original Indian borders into many diverse cultures. But the transition is never easy – and now especially is no exception. A healthy and effective transition to the West depends on the pure transmission of Lord Buddha’s teachings and practices from the minds of realized teachers to Western minds. And this depends on the existence of monks and nuns, who will in turn practice and realize the teachings and become the new lamas, the holders of Buddha’s Dharma.

The IMI now has six monastic communities, in France, Italy and Australia – and Taiwan. Some 60 monks and nuns live, study and meditate in these monasteries. The majority of the other monks and nuns live and work in predominantly lay centers.

Although monasticism is not new to the West, Buddhist monasticism is. The IMI monasteries are attempting to evolve in a way that is in keeping with the spirit of the traditional monastic law but at the same time is appropriate to their indigenous cultures. But it is not easy. Since the first ordinations in 1970, of the 200 Western men and women who have taken vows, 75 have disrobed. Some communities have ceased; others struggle to survive.

There is much discussion among Buddhists in the West about the relevance of monasticism. In an article on monasticism in the Winter 1995 issue of the American Buddhist magazine, Tricycle – it devoted 60 pages to the subject – Stephen Bachelor, for one, looks at the issue. “The question today,” he says, “is whether the modern world is significantly different that monasticism should no longer be considered central to the Buddhist [community].”

This would be the right question if monasticism were merely cultural, relevant only to Asia. Lama Zopa Rinpoche makes it clear that it is not. The text In Praise of Vinaya says: “Just as the earth is the basis of life and gives birth to all that grows, likewise good vinaya is the basis of those striving to control the mind, and it gives birth to merit. Discipline is understood as the source of every excellence, and abidance by that is said to be vinaya.”

It is more than likely that the vast majority of Western Buddhists will continue to be lay people, that many meditators will be lay; that many scholars, unlike in the East, will be lay. And no doubt monasteries will develop differently in the democratic West and the relationship between lay people and Sangha will be different. These are cultural expressions of Buddhism, and it’s appropriate they change, as radically as they need to.

Often, too, in the West, ordination as monks and nuns is seen as simply a lifestyle choice, of equal value in terms of studying and practicing Dharma. In a letter to the editor one man responds to Australian monk Ven. Thubten Gyatso’s sadness (Mandala, March-April 1996) at the number of IMI disrobings: “I find [his] sentiments quaint, old-fashioned, and in fact a bit humorous.” His response would be appropriate if ordination had no special role to play.

In The Heaps of Jewels Sutra, Buddha said: “If all the beings in the universe were to become bodhisattvas as lay people, and the each offered a butterlamp as vast as a great ocean to a stupa containing the relics of all the [past] Buddhas, this would not equal even a fraction of the merit gained by a single ordained bodhisattva offering one butterlamp to the holy stupa.”

If the existence of ordained Sangha is fundamental to the existence of the Buddhadharma, then what is it that makes it fundamental? What is the essence? The essential difference between lay people and ordained Sangha is the level of vows they have taken – in other words the extent to which they abide by the vinaya, Buddha’s rules of moral conduct for lay and ordained.

In Praise of Vinaya continues: “As long as the complete vinaya, the supreme treasure, abides, the lamp of the Dharma will shine.” The “complete vinaya” refers to all the rules of moral conduct, from those for lay people to those for fully ordained monks and nuns. In order words, if the laws of moral conduct of fully ordained monks and nuns are no longer held by anyone, the Dharma itself would no longer exist.

It is taught that, in general, vows of morality, the vows of individual liberation, pratimoksha, as laid out in The Vinaya Sutra, are the foundation for all realizations on the path to enlightenment. In a teaching at Kopan Monastery in Nepal in December 1992, Lama Zopa Rinpoche said that if one had the choice between, on the one hand, practicing purification methods day and night throughout one’s entire life without holding vows of morality and, on the other, simply keeping vows of morality, one would definitely get ahead on the path more quickly by the latter method. Vows are said to have such power that without them, he said, it is virtually impossible to progress.

And according to the Theravada teachings on how to achieve liberation – which coincide with the teachings in the lower and middle scopes of lam-rim, the steps on the path to enlightenment – it is impossible to achieve nirvana without holding the full set of vows of individual liberation, those of the ordained Sangha.

The destruction of delusion and its elaborate constructs is a practical issue, not a moralistic one. The only way to free oneself from suffering and the causes of suffering – to get rid of samsara – is by achieving irreversibly the wisdom that realizes emptiness; the only way to do that is by accessing a very subtle, non-conceptual level of consciousness; and the only way to do that is by achieving the samadhi of single-pointed concentration. And the method for realizing that is the practice of morality. And the best, most sensible, most effective way of practicing morality is by keeping vows of morality, abiding by vinaya.

Logically then, the more vows one has and keeps – that one uses as the tools they’re meant to be – the easier it is to effectively learn and internalize the stages of the path to enlightenment, the opposite of samsara. And it’s common sense that one is more likely to succeed at something by devoting more time to it than less and by living in an environment – internal and external – that totally supports the endeavor. Whether the endeavor is tennis, music or buddhahood, the principle is the same.

It’s important that we in the West distinguish between the cultural expressions of Buddhism and Buddha’s teachings. We need to investigate and understand well the logic behind Lord Buddha’s assertion that ordained Sangha are crucial. Then we’ll begin to see the incredible benefits to the whole of Buddhadharma of the presence of vibrant communities of monks and nuns, however few or however small, and will delight in supporting them.

Use problems as ornaments, seeing them as extremely precious, because they make you achieve enlightenment quickly, by getting you to achieve bodhicitta. Experience these problems on behalf of all sentient beings, giving all happiness to sentient beings. This is the ornament.